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The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, by Dorian
Lynskey, Picador, 368 pp, £16.99, 978-1509890736

“It wouldn’t have been so gloomy if I had not been so ill,” Orwell
supposedly said of Nineteen Eighty-Four. And even on the closest reading
the novel seems a relentlessly cheerless affair. Airstrip One ‑
previously England ‑ is shabby and neglected, a grim place: “underfed
people … in leaky shoes … patched up nineteenth century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories”. Winston Smith ends up not
so much defeated as effaced. The Party’s rule seems total. It can snoop
into your house and scan your face for symptoms of dissent ‑ anything
less than the compulsory look of “quiet optimism”. Not only that, it can
make you doubt your own memory, question the very evidence of your
senses, reject that most basic a priori: 2+2=4. And if it hasn’t got
you, chances are it has your child, schooled to dob you in without a
second thought.